About us

We wish our readers a Happy New Year! Hopefully this year comes with a lot of edits and awesome new data to be added. Additionally, we welcome Rolf (Rogehm from Germany) and Moises (@moiarscan from Spain) who helped a lot at the end of last year. We are however always looking for additional helping hands especially from Latin America. A happy new Year in the OSM-World 2016!

You like OSM? you like working in an international team? You speak English and Spanish? You like investigation? You like the semanarioOSM? You hate typos? THEN we need YOU! We weeklyOSM needs you! We have different tasks for you: Collect Links, write articles, translate articles, review the written blog and some more.

User mikelmaron learned that several houses will be constructed in his neighbourhood. As the space which will host the new houses is limited, mikelmaron has some thoughts on how the district will look like in the future.

A IPv6 problem of a JOSM user lead to a long discussion about the misbehaviour of JOSM (or Java) wrt. IPv6.

Community

On January 2nd 2016 Grant Slater activated the Visual Editor on the OSM wiki. This kind of WYSIWYG editor allows to edit the wiki without fiddling with wiki syntax.

[1] The Nicaraguan OSM community wants to print the first public transportation map of the capital’s 42 bus routes in Managua and is asking for your support. The data has been crowd-sourced by more than 150 volunteers using over OpenStreetMap.

Imports

Michael Gratton wonders how can he map residential and commercial property boundaries found in the NSW LPI data (Australia).

Humanitarian OSM

Frederik Ramm (User: woodpeck) gave a short interview to Deutschlandradio Kultur (German cultural radio) about the subject of mapping of refugee camps, for examples the one in Dabaab (Kenya).

The MapKibera project, started in 2009, made its mission to map the infrastructure in Nairobi and to communicate it. They intend to accomplish their mission by giving training and orientation about different topics (GPS, internet, communication services) to the population of the biggest slum in Nairobi. This information resulted in maps, info boards, community achievements, safety, cleanliness and above all respect. The contact to the local authorities was also achieved. Different single working groups came together. The empty space which was on the map disappeared and the people in the region have now, thanks to OSM , a better life!

Missing maps has been hosting multiple mapthons some of which have focused on mapping specifically for resilience projects in Ecuador and Colombia. There will also be a local Mapathon in Columbia hosted by Humberto Yances Humberto Yances in Bogotá on 20th January.The GIS team from the American Red Cross will be traveling to Ecuador in the first two week of February to map in Haquillas in the Provice El Oro together with the Ecuadorianian Red Cross.This will be followed by two weeks of community mapping in La Guajira specially Riohacha and Nazareth in February.

The Salzburg geoinformatics community supports international aid organizations by their efforts to supply and care about refugees. This is done by automatically counting tents and analyzing satellite images to help finding suitable drilling spots for water wells.

Programming

Developer Tim Teulings (aka Framstag) has written a review about the framework Libosmscout for the passed year 2015 and a prospect about new features to come in the year 2016. Also there is News about the automatic build process of Libosmscout.

The fresh released LunaRender is aiming at ad-hoc rendering of OSM XLM data to SVG, see the OSM wiki for details. Examples are presented in the author’s blog. It is based on the lua programming language, binaries for Windows OS are ready to download.

About the OSM editor Merkaartor, core developer Krakanos is looking for support to publish this program also on Apple OSX. Besides he reports about recent status and aims for a planned version 0.19.

Nathanael Long is working on his bachelor thesis for new approaches for pedestrian routing. So for example sidewalks should be derived from conventional OSM data without having to create hundreds of new footways.

Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please don’t forget to mention the city and the country in the calendar.Please use [edit blog detail] to enter category